The Good Funeral Guide Blog

What’s next?

Friday, 27 September 2013

Don’t underestimate the insistence of the human ego on a negotiated immortality and the dread of losing even this. If all the people on earth die, and there are no more to come, it also means that my traces, my genes and the children who carry them, my influence on others, words I have written and spoken, music and art I may have created, all the shouts and whispers of who I am, are also erased. I die twice. SANDRA SHAPIRO

While I do care about the future of my friends and family, I do the things I enjoy doing regardless of what happens after my death because, according to my existentialist perspective, there is no purpose to life besides taking advantage of what it gives us. NATALIE BARMAN

3 comments on “What’s next?”

Kitty

Friday 27th September 2013 at 2:42 pm

And one from Noel Coward:
I’m here for a short visit only
And I’d rather be loved than hated.
Eternity may be lonely
When my body’s disintegrated;
And that which is loosely termed my soul
Goes whizzing off through the infinite
By means of some vague remote control.
I’d like to think I was missed a bit.

Richard

Friday 27th September 2013 at 9:20 am

And two from Alain de Botton:

We don’t exist unless there is someone who can see us existing, what we say has no meaning until someone can understand.

We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick’s skull.

Jonathan

Friday 27th September 2013 at 2:21 pm

And a couple from Jonathan Taylor:

“It doesn’t matter if the human race lasts a billion, billion eons; it’s all less than a millisecond compared with forever, and if that’s what our meaning depends on we’re ultimately as meaningless as if that asteroid had hit us yesterday.”

“If that’s all you have to do to call yourself a professor if philosophy, it’s time they made the exams harder.”